by Sheila Hale
At the end of October 1542 Titian accepted a commission from the Venetian representative in Serravalle to paint an altarpiece for the cathedral (the Virgin and Child in Glory with Sts Andrew and Peter, still in situ over the high altar), and sent a drawing for it on the back of a letter to ‘The Magnificent and Most Illustrious Signor Podestà of Serravalle’:
I greatly wish to serve Your Magnificence and this Honourable Community in the matter of the promised altarpiece, the sketch for which is well advanced. If you do not fail to support me, you will know from the result the affection and love that I bear you. And because the space for the altarpiece is too big, I would like to make a gilded border half a foot wide to go all around it, as it is here below. Please write and tell me what you think.
According to the contract signed on 13 November Titian was to receive 250 ducats for the painting. The idea of acquiring property in the area may well have come from Francesco, who had connections there going back as far as 1526 when he was paid for decorating a banner for the cathedral of Ceneda.4 Francesco, who travelled frequently on the mainland, painting altarpieces, investing in real estate and supervising the timber business, would have needed a base there more than Titian; and although the investment was probably a joint venture, it is Francesco who is recorded in 1547 as the owner of ten fields, on which there was a house roofed with pantiles and a barn for storing hay, as well as of other neighbouring properties. He may have camped out in the house while supervising construction of the new villa, which began in 1547. In the following year Titian and his studio painted a triptych of the Virgin and Child with Sts Peter and Paul for the parish church of San Fior Sopra (Vittorio Veneto, Museo Diocesani di Arte Sacra, now very ruined) in return for which the citizens of Ceneda gave him the building materials, their transport to the site, local labour, the loan of equipment to till his land, and seeds. By 1550 Francesco had continued to expand the Vecellio real estate portfolio with the purchase of another twelve fields, four of them near Conegliano. But six years later, by which time Francesco was immersed in the local politics of Cadore, the title deeds were returned to Titian, who was planning to pass his properties on to Orazio. It was also in 1547 that Titian finished the altarpiece for Serravalle, with considerable assistance from his studio. The authorities, however, were reluctant to pay the full fee, not as one might expect because Titian’s hand is barely discernible in it, but, so they insisted, because the final touches had not been made with the quantity and quality of the colours they had specified. The dispute rumbled on. Francesco took over the negotiations, with the help in the last stages of the procurator Celso Sanfior, and the full amount was finally handed over in February 1553.
In the years around 1540 Titian was primarily occupied with portraiture. He had of course painted portraits all his life, but never perhaps at quite the rate he did in this period when his genius for conferring immortality on his sitters by making them, so his contemporaries said, seem to live and breathe was at peak demand. Many of the portraits from this period are of foreigners, perhaps because times were hard in Venice and fewer Venetians could afford his prices. They are now so scattered that it would take a trip nearly round the world to grasp how prodigious his output was during these years. Many have disappeared. One of the most regrettable losses is the portrait he painted in 1540 or 1541 of Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who was only in his mid-thirties when he succeeded Lope de Soria as imperial ambassador in Venice in 1539. Scion of the old Castilian aristocracy and a younger son of the patrician governor of Granada, Mendoza was also one of the outstanding intellects in Charles V’s diplomatic corps. He had studied Arabic, Latin and Greek as well as civil and canon law in Granada and Salamanca before entering Charles’s service in 1532; and had been imperial ambassador in England during Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings before coming to Venice, where he was closely involved in negotiations for the General Council of the Church that would begin sitting at Trent in 1545 and where he would act as the Spanish representative. In Venice, the city he found the most intellectually stimulating of all his postings, he collected Greek manuscripts, one of which would later inspire Titian’s Rape of Europa painted for the King of Spain Philip II,5 and started writing a novel,6 which would be a source for Titian’s Venus and Adonis, also for Philip.
Mendoza enjoyed himself in Venice. He took a summer house with a pleasant garden on Murano, and fell obsessively in love with a Jewish woman, whom he described in a letter to his friend Francisco de los Cobos as the most beautiful and most intelligent Jewess he had ever seen in his life, ‘a woman who has a head’. Cobos, whose own love affair with Cornelia Malaspina would have inclined him to be sympathetic, supplied him with gifts from Spain for the Jewess, and joked about setting a date for his circumcision. Mendoza had Titian paint her portrait and requested a sonnet about it from Aretino, who was not, however, permitted to see the portrait, which Mendoza kept wrapped in silk like a reliquary. The ever ingenious Aretino, whose pen was never stalled by such minor obstacles, responded with typical artifice:7
Furtively, Titian and Love
Taking up their brushes and squares,
Created two examples of a beautiful woman,
And dedicated them to Mendoza, excellent Lord.
…
And while that effigy and this image
He inwardly reveals to himself and outwardly conceals from others,
And in so doing desires more, appearing to desire less …8
Aretino, who relied on Mendoza to help keep his imperial pension flowing and was forever praising his youth, elegant mind, knowledge and quick wits, also wrote a sonnet about Titian’s portrait of him.9
According to Vasari, the portrait of Mendoza was the first of Titian’s two earliest full-length portraits and therefore a landmark in his stylistic development.10
Vasari was himself in Venice at the time Titian painted another full-length portrait, of Cristoforo Madruzzo (São Paulo, Museu de Arte), a nobleman and successful career ecclesiastic from Trent who was in Venice from mid-February to mid-March of 1542. But although Vasari probably heard about Titian’s second full-length portrait, he may not have seen it because Madruzzo does not, as he claimed, wear the red robe of a cardinal, a position to which he was not raised until the following year. He dressed for his portrait, walking towards us on a red carpet ‘like a minister busy with the cares of state’,11 in the black robe and hat of the prince-bishop of Trent, a position he had held since 1539. It was Madruzzo, who had the respect of both the emperor and the pope and became one of the most powerful men in Europe, who would finally resolve their long-standing quarrel about whether the nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church should take place on Italian or imperial soil by persuading Paul III to accept Trent, a free city of the Holy Roman Empire but geographically close to Italy, as the venue. At Trent he would act as host and chair of the first sitting of the Council and be rewarded by the emperor in 1546 with an annual pension of 2,000 ducats. Two inscriptions on his portrait giving the date 1552, one on the clock and one at the upper right, have caused some scholars to prefer that date. But both are much later additions, certainly not by Titian, and may refer to the clock, a valuable object but so clumsily painted that it could not possibly be by Titian, rather than to the portrait.12
When Jacob Burckhardt13 wrote that no Florentine could paint Florentine intellectuals as well as Titian, he gave as an example Titian’s fine portrait of Benedetto Varchi holding a leather-bound book (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).14 Varchi, the leading central Italian intellectual to follow Machiavelli, was in Venice between 1536 and 1540 acting as tutor to the children of the Strozzi, the immensely wealthy Florentine banking family who had taken refuge in the lagoon city after their failed attempt to unseat the Medici, which had been mounted with the aid of France. In Venice the Strozzi moved in French circles, but were expelled in 1542 when they were implicated in the leaking of state secrets to the French ambassador. Before their departure Titian immortalized the curly-haired
Clarissa (Berlin, Staatliche Museen), the first-born child of Roberto Strozzi, with what is one of the most enchanting portraits of a toddler ever painted as well as one of Titian’s most masterly studies of arrested motion. The little girl, as we see from the inscription on the tablet on the wall above her, was two years old at the time Titian caught her animated figure and set it against the intersection of a dark wall and a wooded landscape. The gold pendant hanging from her belt is swinging, her liveliness echoed by the frolicking putti of the relief carving under the table.15 Titian, who understood children and dogs, seems to have captured her attention by pretending that his real subject is her little spaniel, which she solemnly holds in place grasping a biscuit – it looks like a corna di gazzella or gazelle’s horn – in her right hand as a promised reward for his obedience. The portrait was finished by July 1542 when Aretino wrote to Titian:
I have seen, dear old friend, your portrait of the little girl of Roberto Strozzi, that grave and excellent gentleman. And since you seek my opinion, I say to you that if I were a painter I would despair; although it would be necessary for my vision to have divine knowledge in order to understand why I should despair. Certainly your brush has kept its miracles for the maturity of your old age. Whereby I, who am not blind to such genius, solemnly swear in all conscience that it is not possible to believe, let alone to do, such a thing; thus it deserves to be placed before all the paintings there have ever been or ever will be. So that nature must swear that such a likeness is not feigned if art asserts that it is not alive. I would praise the puppy that she strokes, if it were enough to exclaim on the liveliness that animates it. And I conclude with the wonder with which this painting takes the words from my mouth.
An unusual double portrait (Northumberland, Alnwick Castle) is of George d’Armagnac, Bishop of Rodez, one of the French ambassadors in Venice in 1536–9, who had Titian portray him with his secretary Guillaume Philandrier. Although Philandrier was a scholar and pupil of Serlio, Titian emphasizes his social inferiority by placing him below and behind the ambassador gazing up adoringly at his master, whose enormous padded shoulders and impassive expression are bows to the French style of portraiture.16 Nothing, however, is known about the circumstances in which Titian painted the portrait of Count Antonio Porcia e Brugnera (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera) who came from an old feudal family in the Friuli, except that it looks as though it was painted around the same time as his portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. But a more intriguing unsolved mystery surrounds one of the most compelling of Titian’s portraits, the so-called Young Englishman (Florence, Galleria Palatina), although there has been no shortage of theories about the identity of this handsome, possibly psychotic young man whose blue eyes seem to out-stare the enquiring gaze of the painter. One idea has been that he is Guidobaldo della Rovere, an earlier portrait of whom Titian was repairing or repainting in 1545. It was listed as a portrait of Aretino in an inventory of the della Rovere collection in the seventeenth century, but looks nothing at all like any of Titian’s surviving portraits of him. A plausible hypothesis17 is that he might be Count Agostino Lando,18 to whom Aretino wrote in November 1539 praising his generosity, thanking him effusively for a gift of anchovies from Piacenza and referring to the portrait Titian was painting of him. If Lando was not psychotic he was capable of violence. Eight years later he took part in the murder of Pier Luigi Farnese, the only son of Paul III, who had given Pier Luigi the Landi’s ancestral domains of Piacenza and Parma.
The Vendramin family, whose group portrait (London, National Gallery) Titian began in the early 1540s,19 were heirs to a large fortune made in the fourteenth century by their ancestor Andrea Vendramin, an industrialist who manufactured soap and a merchant dealing in oil and other commodities, who was received into the Venetian patriciate in 1381 for services to the Republic in the war against Genoa. Andrea’s grandson, also Andrea, had been doge in the years 1476–8. One of Andrea’s great-nephews was Gabriele Vendramin, who played host to the artists and intellectuals of his day and whose large and famous collection of paintings and antiquities included Giorgione’s Tempesta. Gabriele was a good friend of Titian, who witnessed codicils to his wills and supplied him with paintings, including a portrait of himself drawing with a sculpture of Venus behind him.20 That painting is lost, but a delightful survival from the collection, one that was widely accepted as autograph only after a cleaning in 2009, is the Triumph of Love (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum),21 in which Cupid armed with bow and arrows prances on a tamed lion which appears to be leaping out of the picture against a luminous fantasy landscape of the lagoon with Titian’s signature mountain in the distance. The theme of love conquering all (in this case even the lion of St Mark) was frequently depicted in engravings, medals and bronzes. Titian’s, which may have been derived from a similar figure in a bronze group in the Vendramin collection, was originally rectangular and intended as the cover of a more valuable painting, perhaps a portrait of a desirable aristocratic woman, in which case Cupid would have acted as a gloss on her beauty as well as concealing it in the interests of discretion. Although such covers were commonplace in the Renaissance, very few have survived, probably because they were considered of secondary importance.22 This example may have been saved for posterity by its charm.
It was probably Gabriele, an admirer of Titian’s Pesaro Madonna in the Frari, who asked Titian to undertake the group portrait of his brother and nephews that was later described in an inventory of the contents of his palace, which still stands in the campiello of Santa Fosca,23 as ‘a large picture in which there are depicted the miraculous cross with Andrea Vendramin with seven sons and Gabriele Vendramin with its gilded frame made by the hand of Titian’. (Gabriele, who had married in 1538, had seven daughters, but it would not have been considered appropriate to include women.) The miraculous cross, a silver-gilt and rock-crystal reliquary in which splinters of the True Cross were preserved, had been received in 1369 on behalf of the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista by Andrea Vendramin, who was then its chief official. This reliquary – it is the one carried by the members of the Scuola in Gentile Bellini’s Procession in San Marco – was responsible for several miracles including the one depicted in Gentile’s Miracle of the Cross at Ponte San Lorenzo for the same cycle. It had also safeguarded the Vendramins’ commercial interests, and Gabriele, who had adopted the children of his brother Andrea at around the time he gave Titian the commission, was concerned that they and their descendants should never forget that their welfare depended on this precious and protective object of veneration.
Gabriele’s brother Andrea, the balding man in the red fur-lined robe, presents the cross to his four oldest children, while the three younger ones sitting on the steps below the altar take more interest in the little puppy – which seems to be out of the same litter as Clarissa Strozzi’s pet – held in place by the youngest child. The question that remains is the identity of the old man with the grey beard who looks out at us while grasping the altar in a proprietorial way. Before the discovery that Gabriele, who was born in 1484, was in fact three years younger than Andrea, it was not unreasonably supposed that the old man, as stated in the inventory, must be Gabriele. But since the central figure is far too grizzled to be a man of only fifty-six, one can speculate that he asked Titian to exaggerate his age in order to suggest the posthumous presence of the Vendramin patriarch Andrea in commemoration of the original receiver of the True Cross and founder of the family fortune and its patrician status.
Titian worked on the painting sporadically for a few years before putting it aside; and by the time he returned to it in the mid-1550s Gabriele, Andrea and Andrea’s eldest son Lunardo (the bearded young man on the left) were all dead.24 After making a start on a major reworking during which he moved Lunardo’s profile further to the left, he allowed a member of his studio to squeeze in the three clumsily painted boys – it must have been the same assistant who painted the youngest man in the mysterious Allegory of Prudence (London, National Gallery) – who w
ould have been given more space if the canvas had been widened as he intended. But the Vendramin Family, although its spatial composition is distorted on the left side, is otherwise entirely autograph and therefore interesting as the only surviving example after the Presentation of the Virgin of a large, complex picture containing many figures begun by Titian in the late 1530s to early 1540s.25
After the death of the wayward Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, both Titian and Aretino were on the lookout for another well-placed friend in the Roman curia who was in a position to advance their interests there. Aretino wanted a cardinalate, Titian a papal benefice for Pomponio. The ideal contact emerged when Titian’s old acquaintance Pietro Bembo, whose invitation to Rome he had refused twenty-six years previously, was among the cardinals appointed by Paul III in March 1539. (Another was Ippolito d’Este, the son of Alfonso d’Este and Bembo’s former mistress Lucrezia Borgia, a coincidence that apparently amused the pope.)26 Before Bembo left Venice for Rome in October Titian painted his portrait (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art) with the grey beard he had started growing four years earlier – in order, so he wrote to Benedetto Varchi, to look more like an antique sage – wearing his cardinal’s hat and scarlet cape, which looks as though it has been taken out of its box and unfolded for the first time. Bembo’s gaunt but lively face – high forehead, hollowed cheeks, penetrating eyes, sharply aquiline nose – looks to his right while the eloquent fingers of his right hand point in the opposite direction. As a connoisseur of painting he would have appreciated the elegance of his portrait and have understood the difficulty of achieving his subtly twisting pose.
